Wednesday, September 9, 2009

And floor trim as.... door trim. Kind of.

OK, it's not really a door.It's what we have been calling the 'Harry Potter' cubby underneath the living room stairs.

We haven't gotten any new trim for the doors yet. I'm resisting buying any new trim for the doors (or windows or anything) until we get the rest of the floor trim up and OUT OF THE DINING ROOM. I just can't see adding to the pile in the dining room right now. I JUST couldn't take it.

But I need to finish the trim in the living room, and we've already decided that the cubby is too small an architectural detail to get the 8"x5" plinth blocks the rest of the doors are going to get. So I'm gonna have to trim the cubby out some how.... Hmmm, I wonder if I can use the floor trim somehow?

Oh yes I can.

This time, I decided to turn the routed out (curvy) part of the trim to the inside, cut the board ends at regular 45 cuts without the funky miter cuts. In relation to the aprons and the 'castles' this part was easy.

I decided to cut off 2" from the flat base of the trim along the entire length to get the final trim size. Once aI knew the final width, I could cut the final lengths. This part was a little tricky.

I held the cut pieces up against the cubby hole wall and traced the outside width leaving a 1/4" reveal (gap) from the inside trim already in place. I did this for the top as well as the two sides.

Where the lines intersected on the wall, I used a square to draw a diagonal line in to the inside corners. This was the template for the cuts.... as long as the top piece was level, because I guarantee you the floor is not.

Once the first cuts were made (I made them 1/4" longer so I had some wiggle room) there was some jockeying about, and a third had was absolutely necessary to line everything up, space the gaps of the cut pieces to exact length.

Then I painted the cut edges with at least three coats of paint to seal the edge, let them dry, then put it all together with some construction adhesive on the back (to hold the boards to the wall but allow some shifting before nailing them in place) and then whammo with the nails.

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Home Sweet

Home Sweet... um... HOME!

(it may need more paint, some trim, and the wrought iron fence installed, but it's no longer "Home Sweet Derelict")

We've been happily married since 2003, together since 2000, and we thought to ourselves, "Hey, let's test the limits of our relationship!" So we're in the process of totally rehabbing an uninhabitable 1868 brick home in Covington Kentucky, for better or for worse, richer or poorer, until one of us kills the other one -- or the renovation project gets finished, of course.

This is our chronicle of our journey into rehabbing/renovation. This blog will hopefully prove to be a resource or even a DIY "renovators' manual" for those who come after us.

Our backgrounds:

She is a creative MBA who got the entrepreneurial bug in 2000, and joined her yet-to-be husband in business. While she has always been handy and crafty, Wife has no professional experience in any of the building trades, nor did any of her immediate family.

He is a long time entrepreneur and newsletter publisher. Not particularly crafty, Husband is reasonably handy and prior to this has had some experience doing stone work, repairing and rebuilding decks and doing smaller repair projects around the house.

In other words, we're rank amateurs figuring this stuff out as we go along.